Common Core’s power grab, As I See it

Those words, uttered by George Castanza on “Seinfeld,” are perhaps the most generous explanation I can imagine for the numerous and utterly false assertions made by Mitchell Chester in “Building a better assessment,” (“As I See It, Telegram & Gazette, April 2), in which he praised the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) test.

It’s important to understand, for starters, that in addition to his role as the Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education, Mr. Chester is also serving his third term as national chair of the PARCC Governing Board. This hardly makes him an objective evaluator of PARCC during this sham of a so-called “two-year test drive.”

Here are just two untruths stated by Mr. Chester:

— “PARCC provides a solid bridge from K-12 to higher education.”

— “It offers a much clearer understanding of whether a student is ready for college”

There is absolutely zero evidence to support these statements. By Mr. Chester’s own admission, PARRC is not even a finished product, so how could any thoughtful person assert that this “untested test” will definitively do what is claimed?

An important question for one to ask is, “How do Massachusetts Schools currently measure up?”

According to The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Massachusetts has led all other states in achievement for an unprecedented five testing cycles in a row. Sixty-three percent of Massachusetts high school students go on directly to college, compared with 55 percent nationwide, putting us in the top tier of states.

A recent Harvard University study found that if Massachusetts was its own country, its students perform on the same level as some of the most educated countries in the world.

And the Science and Engineering Readiness Index (SERI), which measures how high school students are performing in physics and calculus, on Advanced Placement scores, and teacher certification requirements, shows that Massachusetts blows away the competition when compared with other U.S. states.

With this in mind, here’s a question I’d like to see on every student’s PARCC test:

“If Massachusetts had a set of standards, a proven test and curriculum that had propelled students to best in the nation status for five straight years and would cost other states $0 to adopt and the federal government had an untested standard, an untested test and an untested curriculum that cost the taxpayers $4.3 billion (the actual amount already spent in Race to the Top Grants), which one would make the most sense for underperforming states to try first?”

Massachusetts, because of our #1 status, has the least to gain and the most to lose by substituting the “theoretically” better Common Core for the irrefutably successful MCAS.

It’s unimaginable that any rational person could even consider such a shift without the empirical evidence showing that it would guarantee a better result. The near-fanaticism of Common Core proponents in the absence of such proof raises profound questions.

It’s worth reminding people that The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 was years in the making. Its metal was forged from the heat of numerous and spirited public debates; a process that is in striking contrast to the origins of Common Core which burst onto the scene from the underbelly of reticent Washington think tanks.

Ironically, the landmark legislation of education reform and the subsequent decades of improvement in student achievement can never again be possible when the copyright-protected language of Common Core becomes the law of the land.

Changes in the world, which would once have taken generations, now occur overnight.

The education institutions that will be of greatest service to its student are those that are most agile. Shifting the responsibility of public education to Washington all but guarantees we will be slow to adapt, assuming it would be capable of any worthwhile modifications at all.

There’s one thing upon which people on either side of the issue will agree. The adoption of Common Core and the federalizing of public education will be, for better or worse, the greatest change of that institution in our country’s history.

What is most troubling to me is that almost no one knows anything about it. It is my firm belief that this runaway train called Common Core has far less to do with education than it does with the colossal build-up of the “Educational Industrial Complex” from which obscene profits and unbridled-power shall be amassed.